Shared Hosting / MySQL Load Balancing?

[help_needed]

I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with load balancing across shared/virtual environments w. PHP/mySQL?

[MarkR]

To me, shared hosting and load balancing are mutually exclusive.

For any sizeable web application, you want exclusive, REALLY dedicated hosting.

Virtualisation sucks incredibly badly for database servers because it does not share out IO bandwidth well between VMs. You want dedicated hardware.

If there is the slightest chance you can afford it, buy dedicated hardware. You'll get waay better IO performance, and most importantly, YOUR application won't be dependent on what IO is happening in other peoples' VMs.

Performance and shared hosting are mutually exclusive.

Mark

[MarkR]

And yes, I do have experience of shared hosting, dedicated hosting, hosting in virtualisation environments and large scale MySQL deployments.

The company I work for now has MySQL on a scale which is probably bigger than yours.

Mark